Carsten you are correct. Xojo is more than its language. It is a toolchain and one of the relatively few ways to multi-target various devices / environments. Again, I bought a Pro license because I believe in that enough to at least do some internal tool development with it. And I have been pleased so far.
But I also cut my teeth on BASIC and I’m old and developing for my own business needs so on all those counts I’m unlikely to give a fig what anyone thinks of my choices. If I were 35 instead of 65, would I have registered Xojo’s existence, much less gave it serious consideration? IDK. Not sure. I think I’d be flattering myself to think so. If I had started in this business in 2013 instead of 1983 I would be the product of very different business and cultural forces; I’d have been formed quite differently in almost every respect.
Michael to your point that Xojo stemmed from Basic but is now structured and much more powerful, I would say it is quite a modern language and has frankly more low-level functionality to draw on when needed than I expected. So I don’t disagree. But you can say the same thing about VB.NET and MSFT is doing its best to murder it without so much as a dignified retirement, and most of the MSFT user base seems indifferent at best and cheering it on at worst. That is because both VB.NET and Xojo and similar are still seen as BASIC. The basic syntax and style and wordiness is unfamiliar to the past generation or so of programmers. In may quarters, for the past couple of generations. That is why VB.NET has gone from the Main Event in .NET to a has-been. I don’t like it or approve of it, but no one’s asking me!
What is “wordy” about it? Looks very similar to most languages that I have come across recently. I can’t comment on VB.NET or C# or Python as I know nothing about any of them. And as I am retired there is no HR Dept here either.
About five years ago I decided that my x-platform app, which presented to the user via a browser window and lots of javascript, and which used AJAX to communicate which PHP scripts to deal with databases and sockets, was going to get into trouble as browser makers decided that you could no longer do this, that, or the other in their browsers. That’s when I decided to recreate it in a compiled language that would run on Mac/Win/Lin. Xojo was pretty much the only candidate I could find at the time.
I still love working with Xojo. But right from my move to Xojo, back in 2013, I hoped the company would grow in size in order to get more powerful and more famous. Nowadays still most companies don’t dare to become dependent on Xojo, if only because there are hardly any developers willing to learn Xojo here in NL. I know Xojo developers who don’t tell potential customers in advance that they are going to develop with Xojo. And of course, it’s about the end product, but developers in the major languages look down on Xojo and often call it a basic dialect. Unknown makes unloved.
In the abstract, me neither. If it is my own stuff, or if a client with an existing commitment to Xojo wanted me to move things forward, I’m happy to completely ignore these considerations. Eager, even.
Popularity is an ephemeral thing. Herd safety is super important to people today, particularly the young and your typical Peter Principle middle manager. It is just reality.
It’s pretty easy to whip up a VB.NET project in Visual Studio out of curiosity, find it unfamiliar, see that as a downside, see the syntactical style as retrograde to no good purpose, and then dismiss it out of hand. Is that uninformed? Sure. Willfully ignorant even. But what is the motivation to BE informed, and to overcome that confirmation bias? It would have to involve things like seeing a lot of jobs requiring that particular skill, seeing MSFT wholeheartedly committed to the language instead of seeing it as a waning user base and a net expense, etc.
It’s kind of pointless to whine about Xojo’s BASIC roots and that’s not what I’m doing, other than to point out that it’s become a liability in the current environment. Not a REAL one in technical terms, and certainly not inherently. I would have to imagine that renaming REAL Basic to Xojo was in part in effort to not put Basic out front as a selling point, it was a tacit recognition that they needed to de-emphasize it given they chose not to move on from it by offering alternative language(s) like some products have done. One I know of allows Python, PHP, JavaScript, what amounts to a modernized FoxPro, and probably late next year, C#. It’s just that the platform / framework itself has its own downsides that I’m leery of.
4D is another one in the same boat as Xojo. They go out of their way not to mention in their literature that their language descends from Pascal because that’s arguably even more passe’ and out of fashion than Basic. It also has some XBase-like overtones and that’s been an officially dead language ever since MSFT dropped FoxPro from Visual Studio after v 6.0.
Yeah I understand the impulse not to tell in advance what you’re using if not asked. I’m not sure it’s ultimately ethical because clients deserve to understand the actual market dynamics they’re committing to over the long haul. Then you have to make a case that what they want done can’t be done, or it would be much harder to do, using alternatives. With things like .NET MAUI and Flutter in the mix it’s getting harder to assert that. And for me personally, I was bit by this before. I had a particular client that I sold on FoxPro for a cross-platform (DOS, Mac, Windows) app for their sales department. I even had personal assurances from M$FT when they bought out Fox Software in the middle of that development effort that these platforms (plus Xenix, which I had another client on) were safe and Nothing Would Change. That came right from the development team in the presence of their PR handlers with the full knowledge that I would publish their statements in FoxTalk magazine, of which I was technical editor and I was interviewing them in that capacity. I’m sure they believed it at the time.
But within a year, all those versions were discontinued except for Windows. And I do not like being made the fool. Not just to that one x-plat client, but to all the readers of the magazine. Of course for the most part they didn’t hold me personally responsible for the dissembling of the vendor. But still. I gave them a bad recommendation and that has never sat well with me.
That was M$FT with all its resources … not Xojo Inc. To M$FT it was “just business” and I’m sure some muck-a-muck overrode saner junior management. I’m sure Xojo is more committed and all-in on its own business plan than MSFT was with FoxPro; after all Xojo is its main product. But the experience has still stuck with me.
As to what is “wordy” about Xojo, IDK, it is less terse than C-family languages IMO but I don’t see it as an issue really. Others disagree.
Someone coming from the .NET world likely would find things like the lack of generics and that string comparisons are case-sensitive by default (the opposite of what they’re used to) to be some kind of deal breaker instead just another language trade-off.
Some people love Python’s dependence on indent levels for control structures and others hate it. It’s all very subjective.
I miss not even being able to do i += 1, which you can do in VB.NET (though you can’t do i++ or ++i). But I agree, it’s no showstopper, particularly if you can actually type, lol.
There’s also something to be said for stylistic consistency. If you want to express things like ++i or i++, use one of the C family languages. But if you want to switch over that kind of thing, I have to question your judgment, frankly. Ultimately all this parochialism around statements like “you can’t even do compact incrementing of variables in Xojo” just reflects the desire to argue rather than make.a substantive point.
Still … people flog this kind of thing, routinely.
I would love for i++ and i-- to be included, but only in the context of a standalone statement. Also, i += 10, i -= 10 would be good. I find them safer, you can’t misspell one of the variable names, and more readable, you can see that ++ is an increment.
As I say I am against being able to place them anymore you can put a variable, but as a standalone line it I think it would be a good addition.
Once I had the opportunity to write a program for an Italian client. As I am from Poland, my client was rightly concerned that I lived a bit too far away to be able to comfortably support my program written in some exotic language - Xojo. Then I wrote to Xojo asking for information on how many registered Xojo programmers are in Italy alone - and got the reply that in Northern Italy alone it’s around 3000. And that convinced my client
Thanks for your answers, Mr. Schmitz. I’d also like to point out that the price of Xojo, or what it’s worth, indicates the number of users who would consider using it for its potential versus affordability and its reach to users in developing countries.
I had to learn programming the traditional way in order to really understand Real Studio’s (Xojo) capabilities, which is very exciting.
A very extraordinary programming IDE.
Many developers consider VB.Net is a toy, compared to serious languages like C#.
That being said, it funny because Microsoft tried to remove VBA (Visual Basic for Application) from Office. But the customers protested so much that VBA is still part of Office applications.
VisualBasic has been very popular, lots of applications were created using it, even if it lacks things like threading. For some (many ?) people, Basic is the idiot language they so much love to hate. Those who say Xojo is niche product never used it and they bash it, Mcch like it is the case with FileMaker.
Originally (ca 2002), VB.NET was promoted as the way forward from VB6. C# was indeed a Java wannabe, almost a trial balloon by comparison really; it came about after MSFT was sued over its own “embrace and extend” attempt on Java. Over time, C# has matured into its own and gained much popularity and VB.NET has gradually come to be neglected.
Originally they talked of no longer keeping VB.NET support in the WinForms tooling and I think also WPF but I believe they relented on that at least for .NET 6, though they are making no effort to keep the VB compiler features up with C#. I haven’t really tracked it. I have a lot of VB.NET in my code base at work but it’s all console and service apps.
Using VB.NET was a decision made before my time at the company, back in the mid 2000’s. To be perfectly honest I always preferred C# but never really felt I was slumming it with VB.NET either. I also resisted migrating that code base to C# despite my personal preference because no one ever made a good business case for doing so. Even so, seeing the handwriting on the wall, any new projects I’ve done have been C# for about 4 years now. Ultimately, we were acquired by a large multinational in early 2000 and they have us in KTLO mode (Keep the Lights On, no new development). If that were not the case I would have recommended a gradual rewrite in C# starting last year, as I assume sometime this decade Microsoft will stop supporting VB.NET and probably no longer bundle it in Visual Studio. That seems to be the general direction.
Sadly the fate of my code base is likely oblivion anyway. Some of the functionality it provides will probably be (badly) developed in Java and honestly the new owners have no clue what they have bought and no interest in what the clients expect or in the technology we’ve built; we are just being stripped for clients and data basically. It’s just that they keep kicking the can down the road on actually shutting us down because the know they will lose most of the clients and they keep kidding themselves that they need Just A Little More Time to add a couple of perfunctory features to win them over to their legacy system.
I may well still be keeping the lights on years from now, lol. I’m taking it year-to-year. It’s fair pay and low stress. Can’t say that about a lot of roles in this business anymore.
